A HISTORY OF THE FALL OF ROCOR, 2000-2007 Vladimir Moss If you see lying and hypocrisy, expose them in front of all, even if they are clothed in purple and fine linen. Metropolitan Anastasy (Gribanovsky) of New York (1906) Hold fast that which thou hast, that no man take thy crown. Revelation 3.11; the last words of St. Philaret of New York (1985) The Holy Flesh hath passed from thee. Jeremiah 11.15 © Copyright Vladimir Moss 2011. All Rights Reserved. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: THE 1990s ..............................................................................3 I. “THE SECOND OCTOBER REVOLUTION”................................................21 II. THE FALL OF THE NEW YORK SYNOD ...................................................26 III. THE CREATION OF THE MANSONVILLE SYNOD...............................36 IV. THE RUSSIAN TRUE ORTHODOX CHURCH.........................................46 V. THE PLOTTERS FALL INTO THEIR OWN PIT.........................................55 VI. HERESY AND CORRUPTION IN SUZDAL..............................................61 VII. THE END-GAME ..........................................................................................74 CONCLUSION: THE HOLY REMNANT.........................................................81 2 INTRODUCTION: THE 1990s Who hath remained among you that has seen this House in its former glory, and how do you see it now? Is it not in your eyes as it were nothing? But take heart now... Haggai 2.3-4. The return of the Russian Church Outside Russia (ROCOR) to Russia in 1990 after almost seventy years’ exile was undoubtedly one of the most significant events in Church history, comparable to the return of the Jews to Jerusalem after the seventy-year exile in Babylon. And yet this momentous step was taken almost casually, without sufficient forethought or a clearly defined strategy. Hence difficult problems arose, problems that had their roots deep in ROCOR’s past history. These problems can be divided into three categories: (A) ROCOR in relation to her own flock at home and abroad, (B) ROCOR in relation to the Catacomb Church, and (C) ROCOR in relation to the Moscow Patriarchate (MP) and the post-Soviet Russian State. A. ROCOR in relation to herself. The problem here is easily stated: how could the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad continue to call herself the Church Abroad if she now had parishes inside Russia? After all, her Founding Statute or Polozhenie stated that ROCOR was an autonomous part of the Autocephalous Russian Church, that part which existed (i) outside the bounds of Russia on the basis of Ukaz № 362 of November 7/20, 1920 of Patriarch Tikhon and the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, and (ii) temporarily until the fall of communism in Russia. 1 With the fall of communism and the creation of ROCOR parishes inside Russia in 1990-91, it would seem that these limitations in space and time no longer applied, and that ROCOR had ceased to exist as a temporary Church body existing outside Russia in accordance with her own definition of herself in the Polozhenie. The solution to this problem would appear to have been obvious: change the Polozhenie! And this was in fact the solution put forward by ROCOR’s leading canonist, Bishop Gregory (Grabbe). However, the ROCOR episcopate declined that suggestion, and the Polozhenie remained unchanged. Why? Although we have no direct evidence on which to base an answer to this question, the following would appear to be a reasonable conclusion from the events as they unfolded in the early 1990s. A change in the Polozhenie that removed the spatial and temporal limitations of ROCOR’s self-definition 1 ROCOR’s Hierarchical Council of 1956 declared that “the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad is an unsevered part of the Local Russian Orthodox Church, being temporarily self-governing on synodal bases, until the abolition of atheist rule in Russia, in accordance with the resolution of the Holy Patriarch, the Holy Synod and the Higher Russian Church Council of November 7/20, 1920, № 362”. 3 would have had the consequence of forcing ROCOR to define herself as the one true Russian Orthodox Church, and therefore to remove the centre of her Church administration from America to Russia and enter into a life-and-death struggle with the MP for the minds and hearts of the Russian people. However, the ROCOR bishops were not prepared to accept these consequences. After all, they were well-established abroad, increasingly dependent economically on contributions from foreign converts to Orthodoxy, and with few exceptions were not prepared to exchange the comforts and relative security of life in the West for the uncertainty and privations of life in Russia, where, although communism was crumbling, the communist élites were still in place in both Church and State. Of course, the whole raison d’être of ROCOR was to return to her homeland in Russia (she was previously called the Russian Church in Exile, and exiles by definition want to return to their homeland); and it was in anticipation of such a return that she had steadfastly refused to endanger her Russian identity by merging with other Local Orthodox Churches or by forming local jurisdictions identified with specific western countries (like the formerly Russian schism from ROCOR calling itself the Orthodox Church of America). But generations had passed since the first emigration, the descendants of that first emigration had settled in western countries, learned their languages, adopted their ways, put down roots in foreign soil, married non-Russians (and often, alas, non-Orthodox non-Russians). The exiles were no longer exiles from, but strangers to, their native land… B. ROCOR in relation to the Catacomb Church. Since 1927, when ROCOR had broken communion simultaneously with the Catacomb Church from Metropolitan Sergius’ MP, she had looked upon the Catacomb Church as the True Church inside Russia with which she remained in mystical communion of prayer and sacraments, even if such communion could not be realized in face-to-face meeting and concelebration. Indeed, after the death of Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsa, the last universally recognised leader of the Russian Church, in 1937, ROCOR commemorated “the episcopate of the persecuted Russian Church”, by which was undoubtedly meant the episcopate of the Catacomb Church. After the war, however, a change began to creep in. On the one hand, news of Catacomb bishops and communities became more and more scarce, and some even began to doubt that the Catacomb Church existed any longer (Archbishop Mark of Berlin declared in the 1990s, when catacombniks were pouring into ROCOR, that the Catacomb Church had died out in the 1950s!). On the other hand, some Catacomb priests inside Russia, having lost contact with, and knowledge of, any canonical bishops there might still be inside Russia, began commemorating Metropolitan Anastasy, first-hierarch of ROCOR. These tendencies gave rise to the not unnatural perception that the leadership of True Russian Orthodoxy had now passed from inside Russia to 4 outside Russia, to ROCOR. Moreover, the significance of the Catacomb Church began to be lost, as the struggle was increasingly seen to be between the “red church” inside Russia (the MP) and the “white church” outside Russia (ROCOR). Of course, the idea of the Catacomb Church remained sacred. But the heroes of the past – the great hieromartyrs of the 1920s and 30s - looked more glorious than their present-day followers. And some even began to look on the “catacombniks”, not as the True Church of Russia clothed in the purple robes of hundreds of thousands of martyrs, but as a spent force – or as uneducated sectarians in need of rescue. They looked on the humble catacombniks, serving, not in the splendid cathedrals of the emigration, but in poor, dingy flats, if not as contemptible, at any rate as unimportant. How could the Russian Church, so splendid in its pre- revolutionary glory, be resurrected on the basis of such poverty? Now it must be admitted that the Catacomb Church was desperately in need of help. After several decades of constant persecution, her population was aging and scattered, with fewer and fewer priests and almost no bishops, while the infiltration of KGB “plants” tended to make different groups suspicious of each other. ROCOR – the one church authority that all catacombniks agreed was true - could indeed provide an inestimable service to them by restoring their apostolic succession, educating a new generation of priests and helping them to adapt to and take advantage of the new conditions of post-Soviet Russia. But much depended on how tactfully this was done. When the first consecration of a bishop for the Catacomb Church was performed by ROCOR on Archimandrite Lazarus (Zhurbenko), it was said that this was done “in order to regulate the church life of the Catacomb Church”.2 But what precisely did this “regulation” mean? If the ROCOR bishops saw their role as providing help for the catacombniks in the same way as they had helped the Greek Old Calendarists in 1969-71 – that is, by re- establishing them as an independent “sister-church”, to use the phrase of Metropolitan Philaret of New York, - then there was hope for a truly profitable cooperation. After all, it was not only the catacombniks who needed help: since the death of the holy Metropolitan Philaret in 1985, ROCOR was beginning to waver in her own faith and piety. Her members needed, in the words of the Lord in Revelation (3.18) to “buy gold tried in the fire” of persecution – and the catacombniks who had passed through the fire of the Soviet persecution had much to offer and instruct them. However, already at a very early stage the impression was created that ROCOR had come into Russia, not in order to unite with the Catacomb Church and work with her for the triumph of True Orthodoxy in Russia, but in order to replace her, or at best to gather the remnants of the catacombs under her sole authority…3 2 “Zaiavlenie Arkhierejskago Sinoda Russkoj Pravoslvnoj Tserkvi Zagranitsej”, Pravoslavnaia Rus’, № 18 (1423), 15/28 September, 1990, p.